Policeman Bluejay
First edition
|
|
| Author |
L. Frank Baum (as "Laura Bancroft") |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Maginel Wright Enright |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | The Twinkle Tales |
| Genre | Fantasy |
| Publisher | Reilly & Britton |
|
Publication date
|
1907 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
Policeman Bluejay or Babes inn Birdland is a children's novel written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by Maginel Wright Enright. First published in 1907, it has been considered one of the best of Baum's works.
In 1906 Baum wrote, and his publisher Reilly & Britton published, a set of six tales for young children, called The Twinkle Tales after their little-girl protagonist. The six were issued in separate chapbooks, but later collected into a volume titled Twinkle and Chubbins: Their Astonishing Adventures in Nature-Fairyland. The series was a hit; Reilly & Britton sold 40,000 copies of the little books in a short time. Such commercial success justified a sequel: Baum took his Policeman Bluejay character from the Twinkle Tale "Bandit Jim Crow" and cast him in a separate novel, to be issued the following year.
Baum published many works – adventure stories, melodramas, and juvenile novels — under pseudonyms; early experience had taught him that he ended up "competing with himself" if he released too much material under his own name. Both The Twinkle Tales and Policeman Bluejay were printed under the pen name "Laura Bancroft" — the only Baum fantasy works published under a pseudonym. Tongue-in-cheek, Katharine Rogers has called Policeman Bluejay "her best work...." Oz author and "Royal Historian" Jack Snow thought Policeman Bluejay Baum's finest fantasy apart from the Oz books.
Policeman Bluejay was another success for Baum and his publishers; a second edition appeared in 1911, under the alternative title Babes in Birdland. The third edition of 1917, also under the new title, dropped the pseudonym and acknowledged Baum's authorship. The book was issued in a facsimile edition in 1981, and was printed again in the second issue of the annual Oz-story Magazine in 1996. A volume that combined all the "Bancroft" material appeared in 2005.
Maginel Wright Enright was in her mid-twenties, and still near the start of her artistic career, when she created the illustrations for The Twinkle Tales and Policeman Bluejay. Her pictures for the "Bancroft" books have been described as having "a child-like grace, a clear clean outline, and a sometimes highly refined decorative sense."
...
Wikipedia